according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

tennessee williams (1911-1983), the modern american dramatist, had his own unique school of dramaturgy. the dramas which he depicted are populated by characters who are lonely, desperate, in anxiety, alienated and in one word lost. they face challenges which they may overcome or not, through the choices they make. all these moods and conditions are clearly seen and explained in the theory of ex...

abstract objectives gradual increase length and complexity of utterance (gilcu) therapy method is a form of operant conditioning. this type of treatment is very precise and controlled that is done in 54 steps in 3 speech situations consisted of monologue, reading and conversation. this study aimed to examine the effects of gilcu treatment method on reduction of speech dysfluency of school-age...

abstract: in this thesis, we focus to class of convex optimization problem whose objective function is given as a linear function and a convex function of a linear transformation of the decision variables and whose feasible region is a polytope. we show that there exists an optimal solution to this class of problems on a face of the constraint polytope of feasible region. based on this, we dev...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

teachers’ beliefs greatly influence their performance in the classroom, their choice of instructional strategies, their way of controlling the class, their dealing with the students, and their general goals and objectives. one of these beliefs is teachers’ sense of efficacy which is viewed as an important construct and has shown to be positively correlated with students’ achievement (ross, 1992...

as the canon is shaped by white male standards rewriting the canonical works of literature is one of the ways through which postcolonial writers subvert the authority of the masters. writing in the language of the masters the colonized writers use the very suppressive tool in the hands of the masters i.e. their language to question the validity of their norms. regarded by most critics to be the...

in reality, most structures involved in geotechnical engineering are three dimensional in nature, and although in many, plane strain or axisymmetric approximations are reasonable, there are some, for which 3-d treatment is required. the quantity of data, and the size of the various vectors and matrices involved in such analysis, increase dramatically. this has sever implications for computer r...